This isn't the life I want
Hello everybody! I'm looking for advice and also I need to know if somebody is on my side. I painfully discovered, just recently, that I'm not living the life the I want. I'm 30 years old and I come from a very little village in the Swiss mountains (where my parents currently live). I live alone in a flat in the nearest town. Both the village and the town (20'000 people) feel horribly restricting to me.
I feel like my life has been pre-ordained by my parent's lifestyle and life choices. I spend my weekends (when I get to visit my parents) in the woods looking for wood to heat the house or cleaning and typing up a mountain cabin which has been for decades in the family and everyone (including my parents and my grandmother) seem to expect my goal in life is to keep up all the family heirlooms and possessions when they will be dead (we possess, as I said, some mountain cabins that now rent seasonly to tourists).
When I was 19, I went away to go to college in an eventful and interesting city, 500 miles away. I dropped out because I felt the pressures of being back home helping my parents with everything they have to do to keep up the cabins (wood work, keeping forests tidy and so on, everything involved with mountain life). Since then I've had multiple jobs always short-term until I ended up on disability for panic attacks, anxiety, and depression. I couldn't take it anymore. I felt imprisoned in this lumberjack lifestyle and I desired to go to big cities, seeing art and culture, partying and meeting people with different backgrounds, having a job that satisfies me.
Disability can help me get back on track and go to school again (in-state, because out of state would be too costly for them), and my idea is to follow a social-work program here in this little region, and then go away forever.
My panic attack have gotten much worse recently and I think because I'm feeling all this pressure. I must add that I'm gay and finding a gay boyfriend in this forgotten by god place is very difficult.
Can somebody help me? Have some advice for me? Help me to understand which are the first steps I have to take in order to be fulfilled and away from all of this in a couple of years? Any young people having a similar situation?
Posted Nov 1, 2023, 4:09 PM UTC